On Cazenave's Archive of the Catastrophe and McGlothlin, Prager, and Zisselsberger's Construction of Testimony

Although it may sound like a cliché, it is important to bear in mind that investments, broadly conceived, are often crucial for the long-term well-being of an individual, family, and generations to follow. This also is true for institutions, including universities, museums, research centers, libraries, and archives, which may be endowed with specific resources (in addition to the purely financial) and cultivated by highly specialized, skilled labor. Both books considered here, Jennifer Cazenave's An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the volume coedited by Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger, The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, explore the history of a tremendously wise investment on the part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM): buying the unused footage, running some 220 hours, from the making of Claude Lanzmann's 9.5-hour movie Shoah (1985). That is, the USHMM received all of the Shoah film except for what was used in Lanzmann's final cut. We never learn precisely how much it cost, but a princely sum is intimated. (Technically speaking, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem also is a partner, but Yad Vashem plays little role in transforming the collection into a scholarly resource.) An outstanding feature of both books is a forthright affirmation that their respective studies make up the inception of a process of comprehending Lanzmann's Shoah archive, rather than a last word.

"In late 1996," writes Lindsay Zarwell and Leslie Swift (in the edited volume), "Michael Berenbaum, then-director of the USHMM Research Institute, and Raye Farr, former director of the USHMM Permanent Exhibition and now-retired director of the USHMM Film Archive, negotiated the acquisition with Lanzmann at the suggestion of [historian] Raul Hilberg" of the outtakes from Shoah (34–35). The adaptation of this purchase entailed incredibly complex decoding, restoration, reassemblage, and description creation far beyond the norm, even in the realm of large and complex archival hoards. Both books owe their existence to the consummation of this deal and perseverance on the part of a team of dedicated professionals, which involved considerable time and expense on the part of the USHMM.

Alas, many of us who conduct archival research find that some collections never attain a complete organization in a systematized manner. On one hand, this is immensely frustrating; on the other hand, it means that there are potential, unexpected gems to be recovered.¹ Although such thoughts are not often articulated, scholars are occasionally exasperated when they know that valuable material exists in a collection, but locating what they seek is a Sisyphean task. In the acknowledgments of his monumental study, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–1945, Richard Overy opined, "As ever I am indebted to the assistance given in the many archives I have visited, with the exception of the American National Archive at College Park, Maryland, which astonishingly still remains a researcher's nightmare."² Overy's jab at the US National Archives and Records Administration is rather mild compared with Lanzmann's derision of the archive work that by almost any measure served him with the utmost competence, respect, and spirit of compromise.

Claude Lanzmann, who died on July 5, 2018, conceived and crafted a brilliant and important film about the Holocaust, Shoah—regarded by many as the greatest film treatment of the destruction of European Jewry—which premiered in 1986. Lanzmann often said that it wasn't a documentary (although he also contradicted himself), and it defies many conventions of the genre, in part due to his heavy-handedness as a director. Lanzmann was a notoriously obstinate and difficult man. I was personally in his presence for less...